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wearing when he’d watched her discover Jeff’s body. With her milk-white skin and fine features, she looked as to-the-manor-born as any of them.
    Not bad for the daughter of a diner waitress and a steelworker. The background check he’d done on her had revealed a gritty past. Her dad had abandoned the family when she was eight. Her mother had died when she was seventeen, after struggling to provide for Riley and a younger, disabled sister. After that, Riley haddone it all, going to school, working, taking care of the sister right up until the sister died, about six months before she met Jeff.
    And the rest, as they say, was history.
    Finn hadn’t liked Jeff Cowan. He had zero respect for the guy. But he had to admit that the bogus billionaire’s baby boy could pick ’em: the woman was out of the ordinary, and not just because she was smokin’ hot.
    But did she know where the money was? The jury was still out on that. At the very least, her actions made her extremely interesting to him.
    To begin with, she’d squawked her head off to the local yokels about her suspicions that Jeff had been murdered, but she hadn’t said a word to anybody about walking inside the family mansion in the middle of the night and finding her ex-husband’s body. And as far as he could tell, she hadn’t told a soul about taking that phone.
    Which ten minutes later she’d disabled by removing the battery, so that if anyone tried remotely locating it they would come up empty.
    He wouldn’t have expected her to even think of doing something like that, much less know how to do it.
    Smart woman. The question was, how smart?
    She had a degree in finance. And she’d been building her own investment firm before George’s arrest brought the walls tumbling down.
    It was a combination that had earned her his undivided attention, unless and until a more viable prospect came along.
    â€œYou sure Cowan didn’t commit suicide?” Bax asked, his tone almost diffident. A chubby five eleven, he had chipmunk cheeks, asnub nose, and smallish blue eyes beneath a light brown brush cut. He was an FBI special agent, but not exactly what anyone would picture when they thought FBI agent: he was a number cruncher, a computer nerd, a geek whose specialty was financial crimes.
    Finn had been brought in as the “asset recovery specialist,” in alphabet agency speak. With no official government role, he had an unofficial mandate to do whatever he had to do to locate the missing money. Bax was, technically, his supervisor. The handler charged with holding the attack dog’s leash.
    Good luck with that.
    â€œYeah,” Finn replied without elaborating. Once upon a time, as a deep-cover CIA operative, it had been his business to get men to talk. He knew all the techniques. He had no doubt that Jeff’s eventual death might well have been part of the program that night. But someone had gotten sloppy, and it had happened sooner than anticipated.
    If whoever had killed him had been good at their jobs, Finn might even have arrived in time to save the little turd’s life.
    For a price, of course. Everything worth having always came with a price. In Jeff’s case, that price would have been information.
    He had a feeling that by the time he’d shown up, Jeff would have been more than willing to tell everything he knew.
    â€œMaybe we should just go ahead and question her. Now that the funeral’s over and everything, I mean,” Bax said uneasily. He was referring to Riley Cowan, whose bright red hair made her impossible to miss among the eddy and swirl of the crowd.
    Finn watched her walking across the grass.
    â€œMargaret! Emma! Riley! Look this way!” a man shouted.
    Finn turned his head to find that TV crews were closing in onthe women. Local cops were present to provide security. Not one of them made a move to intervene. Heading off assault by media clearly wasn’t why they